Welcome to the Fishing Report. It is raining right now in Townsend. That will continue until tomorrow. We’ll probably get about one inch. There was a lot of traffic in town yesterday and last night. Our Winter Festival is going on this weekend. It started yesterday. I left the store late last night. Headlights from vehicles lit the town. It was quiet here this morning. I came to work at 7:35 am. Activity will pick up soon.

Little River is actually lower than normal for the first time in a long time. Right now the flow is 340 cubic feet per second (cfs). Median flow for this date is 347 cfs. It will continue to be warm. The low tonight is expected to be 50 degrees. Wow!

We have a lot going on today at the store. Mike Adams and John Thurman will be tying flies. These guys are really good to watch and talk to. Just come on by, grab a cup of coffee and sit down with them. They will tie between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm. IT'S FREE! Walter is teaching a fly tying class. I think we have 6 students. So, there will be plenty of activity at Little River Outfitters.

Fishing is good. The water temperature is much warmer than normal for February. There are bugs hatching and trout are taking dry flies. Nymphs might work best but dries are working too. One guy told me yesterday the trout started rising at about 2:00 pm. Before that they would not take a dry fly where he was fishing. Some people reported trout taking the dry and not the nymph dropper. I heard that twice yesterday. This good fishing should continue until we get some cold weather again.

Fishing has been good all over East Tennessee. Anglers are getting out and having fun. Buzz told me yesterday he fished a delayed harvest stream and caught about 30 trout two days ago.

Yesterday I mentioned the new Lamson Special Edition Guru Reel on this report. I even had some photographs that I had taken of the reel. I noticed a fairly large increase in the readership of this report. This page was opened by almost 700 unique people yesterday. Maybe the search engines picked up on it. That happens quickly these days. I see this fishing report show up on Google in the archive sometime a few days after it is written. Once it was picked up the next day. You can see yesterday’s report by clicking on the Fishing Report Archive to the left. Those pictures did turn out pretty well. I guess I got lucky.

We may see more bear activity around here. The warmth brings them out of their dens and they are hungry. TWRA is also doing some research through the University of Tennessee. They want to know how people feel about bears in their neighborhoods. We are used to that. Bears are around our house all the time. We don’t have garbage cans outside and we don’t have bird feeders. We dump our household garbage in the dumpster here at work. We have never had a bear dive into our dumpster. So, we are used to having bears around and we don’t mind.

In other areas of Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and Kentucky the bear populations have exploded. I read somewhere this morning that Kentucky Fish and Wildlife is considering a bear hunting season. There was a good article on the KnoxNews website about the growth of bear populations in our state. TWRA made some interesting points. You can read the article by CLICKING HERE.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed yesterday at the highest level since May 2008. The Dow rose to 12862.23, a 1.23% increase in one day. Another 10% rise in the blue chips would bring the average to it’s highest level ever, 14164 in October 2007. More improvement in the unemployment numbers drove the markets yesterday. And that has been happening for months as the economy improves and more people are going back to work. The unemployment rate in the United States is 8.3%. The unemployment rate was 10.8% in March of 1983 and 10% in October 2009. The unemployment rate was 10.8% in Tennessee in August 2009. Last month the rate in our state was 9.1%.

Here is a disturbing story I read this morning. A cargo boat carrying space rocket components hit a bridge in Kentucky, destroying about 300 feet of the structure. I have driven over that bridge. Either the boat was too tall or the bridge was too low. You can read the story by CLICKING HERE.

Well, people are arriving to the store already and we are not even open yet. I better go.